Amazing Grace, In History and Now (Sermon, Lent 4)

On New Year’s Day 1773, in Olney, England, the pastor of St. Peter and St. Paul Parish led a prayer meeting to mark the new year. As was expected of clergy at the time, this pastor wrote hymns and verses for his congregation to help communicate the faith, lift their spirits, and continue the tradition of the church to praise God in song. Most of the songs and chants in his day had no set tune but would fit any number of tunes with a common meter or rhythm. 

For this New Year’s Day, the parish pastor had written a set of verses he called “Faith’s Review and Expectation”. He felt that the occasion called for remembering all God had done and how God had delivered each person to the present. Reflection on the past and understanding the hand of God at work built the necessary trust in the Divine for the future. The pastor, one John Newton, began his hymn with a quotation from 1 Chronicles 17:16, Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said: “Who am I, Lord God, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?

Newton’s use of singular pronouns and declaration of himself as a wretch in his new song was not unusual and, in fact, was part of what made him a relatable and popular parish priest. He often told stories about himself, and what he was like before his conversion to Christianity. He assured those who listened that he couldn’t begin to exaggerate the extent to which he swore, gambled, and drank. 

The extent of his sins, however, wasn’t limited to bad language and poor habits. His reflections on his pre-Christian life included regret for participating in the triangle trade, wherein finished goods were shipped from Europe to Africa and exchanged for enslaved people, who were then traded in the Americas for coffee and sugar. 

In 1788, 34 years after he had retired from the slave trade, Newton broke a long silence on the subject with the publication of a forceful pamphlet Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, in which he described the horrific conditions of the slave ships, which he knew firsthand. He apologized for "a confession, which ... comes too late ... It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders." 

Newton’s conversion to Christianity took place on a merchant ship in 1748. He was caught, with others, in a terrible storm off the coast of Ireland. While manning the bilge pump to rid the ship of extra water for hours, he off-handedly spoke about the need for the Lord’s mercy if they were to survive. It was from this day forward that he began to read his Bible and study other Christian literature. 

Newton always marked that day as significant to his life of faith, but he didn’t believe that his true or complete conversion happened until later. He captained 3 separate voyages with enslaved persons as cargo in 1750, 1752, and 1753. He had a stroke in 1754 that kept him from captaining any more voyages, but he continued to invest in slaving operations for another four years. He wrote that he couldn’t consider himself a believer in the full sense of the word until a considerable time after his 1748 experience in the storm. 

For Newton, one couldn’t be fully a Christian without a full and recognizable practice of Christian living, discipline, and devotion. It was this attitude, not the song for which we know him, that made him a popular parish priest. In fact, after serving for 15 years in Olney, he was moved to a London parish where he served for almost 30 years. In that position, he was consulted by many social and political reformers, including those who sought to remove England from the slave trade. 

In England, Newton’s reputation is as an abolitionist, as well as a thoughtful advisor to important historical figures. In the United States, however, he became known more through his song, “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound”, which was very popular in the religious Great Awakenings of the early 19th century. Amazing Grace, along with other songs in common meter, struck the right note between praise and personal piety, which was the sweet spot for the spiritual revivals. 

In the American South, singing preachers used the shape note tradition to teach music for congregational and social singing. Amazing Grace was a popular song and was matched with the now familiar tune “New Britain” in 1847 by William Walker in the songbook Southern Harmony. No one is certain of the origin of this tune, but it is particularly interesting because it makes use of the pentatonic scale- played on the black keys of the piano. Almost all songs we think of as African American or Black spirituals used the 5-note pentatonic scale, which goes way back in human history in use across the world and across world religions. 

In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe included a scene in which Tom, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sings verses of Amazing Grace during a time of deep crisis. As the daughter of a well-known preacher, Stowe likely went to many revivals and had heard and sung the hymn many times. Familiar with its power to strengthen faith’s hope and trust, she also included Tom singing the verse, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years.” This wasn’t in Newton’s original verses, but was a verse cribbed from the hymn “Jerusalem, My Happy Home”. Revival singing of hymns often mixed and matched verses, by Stowe’s inclusion of this verse in her very popular book linked it permanently with the hymn’s other lines. 

I could easily go on about the history of this hymn, since we’re not even to the American Civil War yet. (The hymn was included in hymnals for soldiers on both sides), but I want to give you more than a history lesson on a Sunday morning. 

While Amazing Grace may have started as a simple chanted verse for a small English congregation to mark a new year, its words and tune are now inextricably linked with abolition, with civil rights, with freedom, with community effort, with grief, and still with faithful hope in God’s provision and deliverance. 

Here's the thing I can’t stop thinking about: one of the people who consistently sought advice and guidance from John Newton was William Wilberforce. William Wilberforce entered British Parliament at the age of 21 in 1780. He was a man of great conscience and considered leaving Parliament to become a clergyman. John Newton encouraged him to serve God where he was, with the influence he had. Every year from 1789 until 1806, William Wilberforce entered a bill into Parliament to abolish the slave trade. The bill was finally passed in 1807. 

How many times was Wilberforce jeered at by his fellow parliamentarians? How often was his bill called “woke” or whatever word they used for “woke” at the time? How many lectures did he endure about the idea that businesses and the economy depended on the trading of human beings? How many times did people point out the verses wherein the Bible seems to "support" slavery or racial inequity? How many times did Wilberforce listen to people say “what about” while mentioning things they had no intention of changing? And now, they are just footnotes in his biographies, because he is the one worth remembering. 

Wilberforce fought on for what he believed in his heart was right, what he had been encouraged to do by a man who had spent some time on the wrong side of that argument and more time regretting what he had done regarding the slave trade. 

And here we are, in a time that is just as contentious as any other in history, celebrating the 250th anniversary of a song that speaks to the sweetness of God’s grace, the ongoing provision of Christ’s care, and the everlasting revelation of the Holy Spirit. If we are to sing this song with any integrity, we cannot simply admire its words and tune, but we must accept the power of its history and we must yield to what it may yet be compelling us to do today, for the sake of the One who has done so much for us. 

In one of his letters of guidance, John Newton wrote, “We often fail to see our present circumstances in the right perspective.” Let us seek, with the Spirit’s help, that right perspective that we may understand the work to which we have been called, the grace we have been given, and the love poured out for us and for all people, by the One who made and kept promises to David and who still finds the lost and causes the blind to see. 

Amen. 

40 M&Ms from the Galatians

It is my father's belief that people understand history best if they know how they are connected to it. Thus, he used to explain that he knew his grandparents who had been born near the turn of the 20th century. The oldest people they would have known would have remembered the time before the American Civil War. The oldest people they knew when they were children might have remembered the presidency of Andrew Jackson or the War of 1812.

Thus, because of my dad, I think of time in 50-year stories. I know someone born in 1954. If that person knew someone born in 1904, we've covered a century of knowledge. I'm only a time collapse away from a person alive before the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk.

At confirmation, the other day, the kids and I did a little math.

Let's say Paul's letter to the Galatians (the frontrunner for being the oldest text in the New Testament) is circa 50 A.D./C.E.

2018 - 50 = 1968 (so that many years separate us from the letter's estimated writing)

1968/50 = 39.36 (Per my 50-year story model, we are slightly less than 40 units from the writing of Galatians.)

I had the confirmands set out a row of 40 M&Ms or Skittles from them across a table. Those 40 M&Ms are forty life stories that are between us and Paul's letter to the Galatians. While there might not actually be a straight line between any of us and that group, there is a direct line of narrative and spiritual inheritance from the Galatians to us (contemporary travelers on the Way of Christ).

I find that amazing to consider. We are 40 generations from Paul, 40 M&Ms between us and the birth of people wrestling with what it meant to be counter-cultural in the Roman Empire. (In Christ, there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free...) There's less than a full Skittle between the Galatians and the life of Jesus. We are 10 Skittles from Martin Luther and he's 30 M&Ms from Paul.

And all of this is a blip when we consider that we are contained within the kairos of Divine, Eternal Love. Chronos means chronological or sequential time, whereas kairos is a reference to an open space in time that create opportunity and right moments. All our M&Ms are provided contained within God's own self and God's own time.

I realize that this way of thinking about time is a little abstract. Yet, it was moving to see 7th and 8th graders contemplate the reality that there are 40 life stories (and more) between them and the writing of the oldest book (a letter) in the New Testament. They reported thinking of everything in the Bible, including, Jesus as long, long ago and far, far away.

The truth is the brown-skinned Jew from Palestine is closer than we think. And his first witnesses are only 40 candies away.

Atonement (Easter Sermon)

Mark 16:1-18; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

We don’t often talk about the order of the books of the Bible. You and I both know that it didn’t fall from the sky, bound in leather, and written in King James English, with the words of Jesus in red. While I love to talk about the whole story of the compilation of the written word, today I’d like to zero in on the two accounts of the resurrection that we heard.

As they say, timing is everything. 1 Corinthians, a letter from Paul to the followers of Jesus in Corinth, is older than the written gospel account according to Mark. Almost all, if not all, of Paul’s remaining seven letters were written before the written gospel accounts were widely circulated. Mark is the oldest of the four gospels that were retained in the written canon or generally accepted books of the written scripture. All that is to say that when we look at today’s readings, what Paul has to say was the generally accepted story about the resurrection in his neck of the woods, ten to fifteen years before Mark’s account was written and moving around in the countryside.*

            Why does that matter? If we consider that Paul’s account was the dominant narrative around 45-55 c.e./a.d. , then we see a story that was spread with some confidence. People with reputations to lose were willing to risk them on spreading the good news of Jesus Christ as they had received it from credible eyewitnesses and community elders. That message, that Jesus had been killed, but that God had raised him from the dead, was shared and the hope of that message created a new kind of community.

            This community, along with the risen Christ, was the kind of welcome and drawing in that even gave hope and awareness of redemption to Paul, who had been a persecutor of that self-same group of believers. Paul speaks with fervor to the Corinthians about the faith they have come to trust, especially because it put the story of Jesus- his life, death, and resurrection- in accordance with the scriptures.

            Thus, those who follow the Way of Christ have not only learned about faithful living in imitating Jesus, but also about the true, abiding, and grace-filled nature of God. Since the Divine nature is eternally present and magnetic, the reality of Jesus reveals forever truths about the mystery and fullness of who God is and what God is about.

            Now let’s say that there are fifteen years between when Paul writes to the Corinthians and when Mark, along with others, writes down a gospel account. Fifteen years. If we pick the earliest possible date for Paul’s letter, 50 c.e., that puts Mark’s writing at year 65.

            What’s happening in the Palestinian countryside in 65 c.e.? Nero is the emperor of Rome until the year 68. Nero’s reign is generally associated with tyranny and extravagance. He liked what he liked and he liked people who made the things he wanted to happen. Even though his reign is still in the larger period called the Pax Romana or the Roman peace, it is only because Rome was not expanding and was generally not at war with larger enemies, though the emperors during this period did squash small-scale rebellions.

            During Nero’s reign, Judeans revolted against Roman rule and oppression. Some Judean Christians were still meeting in synagogues and had ties to the Jewish community. When the whole area rebelled against Rome, it affected everyone. And Rome slapped back.

            So Mark is writing the narrative of Jesus, the Son of God. In Mark’s narrative, some unexpected people- Gentiles, women, demons, children- recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Others- the disciples, religious leaders, faithful Jews- struggle to understand Jesus’ message, deeds, and death. Imagine, if you will, that you are in a time of political unrest, a time of extreme disagreement between citizens, a time of force and violence from the state and actors for the government, and, within religious communities, a struggle between which people are the “most” faithful. Are you able to imagine that?

           

            Thus, we find the collapse between Paul’s confident account of the resurrection and its credible witnesses and Mark’s women fearfully approaching the empty tomb. Writers shape stories for their community. They write the truth in shape and size that their people- readers and hearers- can handle and not be driven away.  Mark’s hearers will be scorched by Paul’s confident narrative.

            In their experience of community destruction, fights about inclusion, and wondering what will remain, the Markan community feels betrayed. As I read through the end of Mark this week, I was intrigued by how often the word “betrayed” showed up, how frequently Jesus was betrayed- by people pleading ignorance, people denying, people abandoning, people watching from afar, people actually betraying- even with a kiss.

            Why does Mark find betrayal of Jesus so significant? It may well be because, unlike Paul’s audience, Mark’s hearers feel betrayed themselves. In fact, they feel betrayed by God. They had believed the story of the resurrection. They had trusted the accounts of the witnesses. They had risked their community and family life to imitate Jesus by healing, serving, and sharing his story. Did they get safety? Were they relieved of Roman oppression? Were their holdings multiplied? Did they find all their needs met?

            Thus, Mark finds himself within a community that is asking the ultimate question, “Was it worth it?” Was the cost of their discipleship worth it? You can’t eat eternal life. It doesn’t clothe anyone. It builds no houses to keep out rain and snow. As real a promise as it is, eternal life does not end wars, plant seeds, or create justice and reconciliation.

            So what was resurrection for, asks Mark’s people, if we are continuing to suffer? Does resurrection mean anything if it doesn’t change our day to day lives?

            Stay with me, now, because I’m going to make a leap. I was recently listening to a fictional story with my son. In the story, a boy made a phone that talked to ghosts. On the ghost phone, the boy called Abraham Lincoln and the boy’s mom called Amelia Earhart. Daniel, my son, told me he would call Neil Armstrong and ask him about walking on the moon.

            He then asked whom I would call. I thought for a minute and then I told him that I would call Sophie Scholl and I would ask her if she thought it was worth it. 1942, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were beheaded for spearheading the White Rose campaign in Germany. The White Rose campaign spread leaflets, primarily on university campuses in Germany, about concentration camps, the misinformation of the Third Reich, and the violence of the Nazi regime.

            I want to tell Sophie that the war went on for three more years, that genocide continues to be a reality in the world, and that there are still people who believe in the supremacy of whiteness over other races and ethnicities. I want to ask her if, knowing all that, she would still do it again. Would she still, knowing that she would die and not necessarily cause the uprising she hoped for, would she still spread those leaflets, speak up for justice, and die for what she believed was right? And, frankly, I don’t know if I want her to say yes or no.

            I wonder the same thing about Peter and Paul, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvey Milk, Mary- the mother of our Lord, and anyone who has struggled, suffered, and/or been killed for their work. Atonement literally means at-one-ment. All of these people are trying to create an atonement- a reconciliation and repair- of serious wrongs that have been done. Is discipleship atonement worth the cost, if it’s your life?

            Going back to Mark, then, it strikes me that the gospel writer is attempting to answer this question for the followers of Jesus who feel betrayed by God. It turns out that God will always say, “Yes, I would do it again.” Poured out into flesh, experiencing the joys and griefs of being human, healing, teaching, and forgiving for the sake of community and hope, reversing human attempts at final rejection in death through the power of resurrection… Mark sees God’s word as “Yes. Yes, I would do it again.”

            It is in God’s own completion of the work of atonement that we come to understand the true power of resurrection in a world that aches with racism, poverty, LGBTQ-exclusion, class divisions, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and general bitterness and division. Resurrection doesn’t mean anything for our day-to-day lives unless we accept the work of atonement. Not only God’s atoning work, but the discipleship at-one-ment we are called to in all our vocations- work, family roles, friendships, citizenship, consumer, and follower of Jesus. If we are hesitant to take up the work of discipleship atonement, we struggle to see the Easter message in our everyday experience. Conversely, commitment to atonement work at home, at church, and in the world brings a deep awareness of the risen Jesus meeting us in all places, in all people, at all times.

            For those of you have received the gift of faith easily, this concept may seem self-evident- of course, God would do it again. God planned it the first time. You are right. You are 1 Corinthians people. Paul’s confidence and credible witness is your shared experience.

            For those of you who wrestle with the gift of faith, who feel that God has presented you with a Rubik’s cube of information that you are trying to make into a neatly solved puzzle, you are not alone. Mark’s community wanted relief from feeling betrayed and from feeling like betrayers because they were not like Paul. They needed to know that their fear, their uncertainty, and their silence was possible in conjunction with their faith. To you, to you, I say, God would do it again. Mark’s short, fast-paced gospel features story after story after story that point to God’s “yes” in Jesus as a revelation of the Divine “yes” of eternity.

            In God’s holy, mysterious reality, atonement and discipleship are always worth the cost. And it would be worth it to save just one. Because that one is beloved, beloved by God. And that one is us. That one is you.

For the sake of the world. For you. Christ is risen.

(He is risen, indeed.)

---

* Oral accounts that dovetail with Mark’s account were likely in circulation prior to the writing of the gospel narrative.

Crosspost: Gaslighting

This was originally written for and posted on RevGalBlogPals.org and posted on 3/21/16. At the time of posting, it generated considerable conversation and commentary. I recommend that you go over there for interesting thoughts beyond this writing.

****************************************************************************

Gaslighting is a strong word.

It’s a strong word with psychological triggers for many people, including me.

Gaslighting involves the perpetrator trying to convince the target (the one being gaslighted) that what they perceive is not actual reality. By convincing the target to doubt herself, the gaslighter gains power through distortion, lies, and misinformation. Soon the target may come depend on the gaslighter for “truth”, since the target no longer trusts his senses, perceptions, or even basic reasoning ability.

Donald Trump has been accused of gaslighting the entire United States of America. By doubling-down when caught in a lie, Trump makes his accusers doubt themselves, rather than backing down and admitting to the truth. His supporters refuse to see the lies because a gaslighter convinces his targets that only he holds the truth. If he says it’s true, it is true. If he says it is not, it is not.

How did we get here? Is this really the to-be-expected results of reality television, endless undeclared war, and a disappearing middle class? Is this the natural result of denying climate change, ignoring global political crises, pretending that we were post-racial, and arguing that the poor are poor due to lack of motivation as opposed to systematic and specific reductions in services and aid?

That’s a short list of topics on which people are gaslighted every day, through various media outlets and from the mouths of leaders. We are hardly able to have conversations with friends and neighbors any more because we have been presented with a specific set of facts in a certain way so many times that we are unable to process contradictory information.

Which brings me to a very difficult question and its answer. Does gaslighting happen in theology? That’s a different question to “Does it happen in church or the Church” to which the answer is, regrettably, yes.

Does gaslighting happen in theology? Is there a line of “truth” that has been presented for so long that no one dares to question it, even though it’s very, very wrong? The answer to this question, as with almost every question in a children’s sermon, is “Yes. Jesus.”

I do not mean that Jesus was or is a gaslighter or that God was or is. However, I believe that the church has been gaslighting Jesus’ story for close to 1800 years or more. We see the worst products of gaslighting in this week, which we call Holy Week.

I once asked a congregation in an open discussion time if Jesus had to die. They all, to a person, said, “Of course. That’s why he came.” For a second, I felt crazy, since I thought otherwise. In that situation, I had the authority, but I was being presented with 60 voices unified (with some, perhaps, afraid to say otherwise), something that I patently held to be false. Yet, the theology of substitutionary atonement had sunk in, somewhere and somehow.

Almost everyone in that room believed that Jesus came to earth with the specific task of getting to the right spot at the right time so that he could die in the right way. And to what end? So God’s honor would be avenged? So satisfaction could be attained? So Christ’s holiness could be swapped for ours in a cosmic deal between the Satan and God?

The Church, or most of her priests and theologians, has promoted some version of this for years. This theological gaslighting comes to a head in Holy Week wherein we feel that we see the culmination of God’s love for us on the cross. We beat our breasts, say we’re not worthy and dare to walk away, telling ourselves we would have been different. We can’t see the truth because the gas lights have been changed so many times that we doubt ourselves.

Good Friday is the depth of human depravity. God did not have a thing to do with it, except to grieve our inability to perceive the Holy. Jesus did not have a thing to do with it, except to forgive whom he could as long as he had breath. The Spirit did not have a thing to do with it, except to shake the earth, rip the curtain, and generally raise a ruckus in frustration at human cruelty. We have been gaslighted into years of believing that there was goodness in the death penalty being applied to the Word Incarnate- another brown man, with a shoddy trial, accused of being an enemy to the state and the establishment.

When we believe this about Holy Friday, we completely miss the point of Easter. It becomes about God being indulgent: “They’ve been punished enough.” We are gaslighted into downgrading the extravagant, holy, uncontrollable power of grace that brings life where breath and hope were gone. If we aren't able to realize the depth of total depravity, then we aren't actually able to hope in the heights of grace. When we’ve been led to that trough, it’s not hard then to drink the waters of works righteousness and apply them in our secular life, as well as our religious practice.

If we believe that our Creator requires a blood sacrifice to avenge honor or expectation.. if we put forward that God gets angry enough to kill a human being (even one who is also fully divine)… if we believe that God makes deals with Satan and they have to engage in a little horse-trading now and then, we do not have very far to go, then, in being gaslighted by leaders and would-be leaders.

Resisting the forces that oppose God (we renounce them!) means being truthful about God’s character and where we have gotten it wrong in the past. It means being honest about the failures of historical theologies and the shortcomings of present ones. It means freeing our Holy Week practices from the hair shirts of reenactments and groveling and being honest about the depravity of people and the amazing-ness of grace.

We must stop theological gaslighting, which can occur in even the most mainline of congregations. If we begin to be honest about the expansiveness of grace, then we will come to look for it in our daily lives. We then will recognize its opposites for what they are and can point them out with confidence and we will not accept being silenced. We will then be closer to working side by side with and for our neighbors for the good of creation and all. The truth will out. Out of the tomb, out of the evangelists, out of our mouths, out in the world.

Hamilton and My French Boyfriend

The other day I encouraged people to blog about a secret obsession or, at least, an unexpected one.

Mine is my love affair of the heart with the Marquis de Lafayette. I read all I can about him. (Yes, I know about Sarah Vowell's new book.) 

My Lafayette love led me to follow through on learning more about the serious popularity of the new musical, Hamilton. Yes, it is a musical about Alexander Hamilton. 

And it is amazing. (Not only because Lafayette does French-accented rapping!)

The musical touches on what it means to be an immigrant, an orphan, a spouse, a parent, a "Founding Father". The musical styles are all over the place, but amazing in their variance and scope. 

There is little religious significance to this, except that people are people and motivations remain the same. There are always those who are driven, those dealing with the unimaginable, those who are afraid to take sides. 

And we live our stories together with our secrets known to God (and the spirit of Lafayette).